Taylor Swift is anti-sexist...but also can’t speak for herself

I try every time. Every time there’s a Taylor Swift news item, I try very, very hard to take the pro. Sometimes I can do it, and you yell at me. And sometimes I can’t. Because, well, sometimes she’s indefensible. You cannot defend this. You CANNOT defend someone who voluntarily chooses to NOT speak for herself.

Have you read the Vanity Fair excerpt yet? Click here if no. As mentioned in the previous post about Swift’s comments re: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Nancy Jo Sales, a veteran journalist who knows her sh-t, interviewed Taylor Swift for the magazine. Swift tells Sales that reports of her romances have been greatly exaggerated. Translation: she’s chaste and doesn’t sleep around and in the last three years she’s only been with Conor Kennedy and Harry Styles:

Specifically of her dating life, Swift says that “if you want some big revelation, since 2010 I have dated exactly two people,” meaning Conor Kennedy and One Direction’s Harry Styles. Though she has gone out with some of the entertainment world’s most notorious bachelors, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Lautner, Joe Jonas, and John Mayer, Swift says, “[t]he fact that there are slide shows of a dozen guys that I either hugged on a red carpet or met for lunch or wrote a song with. . . it’s just kind of ridiculous.” As she sits drinking lavender lemonade in her “Tim Burton–Alice in Wonderland–pirate ship–Peter Pan” apartment, Swift continues, “It’s why I have to avoid the tabloid part of our culture, because they turn you into a fictional character.” When Sales asks Swift if she’s boy-crazy, Swift smiles. “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.”

As a standalone? That quote? Fine. You can definitely take the pro on that one. Easy.

But then...

Then we go from sexist to this -- refusing to discuss her personal life but instead granting permission to a friend, called a “source” in the article”, to explain her personal life for her, including why she broke up with Harry Styles. Answer: according to the Official Taylor Swift Source, because he was an unfaithful prick:

Although one of Swift’s rules is that she doesn’t go into the personal details of any of her relationships, she authorized someone to discuss them with Sales. “He wore her down,” the source says of Styles, who allegedly “chased” Swift for a year. “He was all, like, ‘You’re amazing—I want to be with you. I want to do this.’” The relationship fell apart after he texted Swift to alert her of a picture on the Internet of him kissing a friend good-bye. They were “making out like with their hands all up in each other’s hair,” says the source. After Swift ended the relationship, he pursued her for the better part of a year until she finally took him back. “But the whole time she says she feels like he’s looking at every girl,” the source continues. And then when they were in London together he “disappears one night and after that it was like he just didn’t want to keep going.” Styles’s rep, Benny Tarantini at Columbia Records, said that all of Swift’s source’s claims are “undeniably false.”

“It was like a pendulum for her, swinging back and forth,” the source says of Swift’s exes, with all of whom age has been a problem. Conor Kennedy, 17 at the time, was “just like a two-month thing,” the source continues, and Swift “says he was awesome.” The source says, “She dated Jake [Gyllenhaal] and John [Mayer] when she was really young and they were in their 30s, and she got really hurt. So it was like ‘That hurt—this won’t. But then it did.’”

That right there? You can’t take the pro on that. You can’t defend that. Because you can’t in one breath advocate for power and in the next muzzle yourself or worse, declare it beneath you to explain yourself, and instead assign the lowly task to someone inferior.

Those are your two choices then.

In allowing someone else to speak for her, Taylor Swift is either:

1.Weak

Or

2.The kind of girl who makes her bitch do her dirty work.

Pick one. Because, in this case, there’s nothing else available.

Oh, and she might also be a liar because she told Nancy Jo Sales (in a very roundabout way) that she didn’t buy the house next to the Kennedys’ in Hyannis Port even though Nancy J Sales’s research (I really like the name Nancy Jo Sales) suggests that she did. The lesson here: Ask her Yes/No questions.